Edith Wharton - SSC 09 (26 page)

 
          
After
that we’ll see—
But
wouldn’t you rather travel for a
year or so? How about
South Africa
or
India
next winter?” he ventured at random, after
trying to think of some point of the globe even more remote from
New York
.

 
          
  

 
          
The
cure was successful, the Viennese specialist’s diagnosis proved to be correct;
and the Paul Dorrances celebrated the event by two years of foreign travel. But
Dorrance never felt again the unconditioned ecstasy he had tasted as he walked
out from the doctor’s door into the lamplit summer streets. After that, at the
very moment of re-entering his hotel, the effort of readjustment had begun; and
ever since it had gone on.

 
          
For
a few months the wanderers, weary of change, had settled in Florence,
captivated by an arcaded villa on a cypress-walled hill, and the new Paul
Dorrance, whom it was now the other’s incessant task to study and placate, had
toyed with the idea of a middle life of cultivated leisure. But he soon grew
tired of his opportunities, and found it necessary to move on, and forget in
strenuous travel his incapacity for assimilation and reflection. And before the
two years were over the old Paul Dorrance, who had constituted himself the
other’s courier and prime minister, discovered that the old and the new were
one, and that the original Paul Dorrance was there, unchanged, unchangeable,
and impatient to get back to his old niche because it was too late to adapt
himself to any other. So the flat was reopened and the Dorrances returned to
New York
.

 
          
The
completeness of his identity with the old Paul Dorrance was indelibly impressed
on the new one on the first evening of his return home. There he was, the same
man in the same setting as when, two years earlier, he had glanced down from
the same armchair and seen the diagnosis of the consulting physicians at his
feet. The hour was late, the room profoundly still; no touch of outward reality
intervened between him and that hallucinating vision. He almost saw the paper
on the
floor,
and with the same gesture as before he
covered his eyes to shut it out. Two years ago—and nothing was changed, after
so many changes, except that he should not hear the hesitating ring at the
door, should not again see Eleanor Welwood, pale and questioning, on the
threshold. Eleanor Welwood did not ring his door-bell now; she had her own
latch-key; she was no longer Eleanor Welwood but Eleanor Dorrance, and asleep
at this moment in the bedroom which had been Dorrance’s, and was now encumbered
with feminine properties, while his own were uncomfortably wedged into the
cramped guest room of the flat.

 
          
Yes—that
was the only change in his life; and how aptly the change in the rooms
symbolized it! During their travels, even after Dorrance’s return to health,
his wife’s presence had been like a soft accompaniment of music, a painted
background to the idle episodes of convalescence; now that he was about to fit
himself into the familiar furrow of old habits and relations he felt as if she
were already expanding and crowding him into a corner. He did not mind about
the room—so he assured himself, though with a twinge of regret for the slant of
winter sun which never reached the guest room; what he minded was what he now
recognized as the huge practical joke that fate had played on him. He had never
meant
,
he the healthy, vigorous, middle-aged Paul
Dorrance, to marry this faded woman for whom he had so long ceased to feel
anything but a friendly tenderness. It was the bogey of death, starting out
from the warm folds of his closely-curtained
life, that
had tricked him into the marriage, and then left him to expiate his folly.

 
          
Poor
Eleanor! It was not her fault if he had imagined, in a moment of morbid
retrospection, that happiness would transform and enlarge her. Under the
surface changes she was still the same: a perfect companion while he was ill
and lonely, an unwitting encumbrance now that (unchanged also) he was restored
to the life from which his instinct of self-preservation had so long excluded
her. Why had he not trusted to that instinct, which had warned him she was the
woman for a sentimental parenthesis, not for the pitiless continuity of
marriage? Why, even her face declared it. A lovely profile, yes; but somehow
the full face was inadequate—

 
          
Dorrance
suddenly remembered another face; that of a girl they had met in
Cairo
the previous winter. He felt the shock of
her young fairness, saw the fruity bloom of her cheeks, the light animal vigor
of every movement, he heard her rich beckoning laugh, and met the eyes
questioning his under the queer slant of her lids. Someone had said: “She’s had
an offer from a man who can give her everything a woman wants; but she’s
refused, and no one can make out why….” Dorrance knew…. She had written to him
since, and he had not answered her letters. And now here he was, installed once
more in the old routine he could not live without, yet from which all the old
savor was gone. “I wonder why I was so scared of dying,” he thought; then the
truth flashed on him. “Why, you fool, you’ve been dead all the time. That first
diagnosis was the true one. Only they put it on the physical plane by mistake—”
The next day he began to insert himself painfully into his furrow.

 
          
  

 
          
One
evening some two years later, as Paul Dorrance put his latchkey into his door,
he said to himself reluctantly: “Perhaps I really ought to take her away for a
change.”

 
          
There
was nothing nowadays that he dreaded as much as change. He had had his fill of
the unexpected, and it had not agreed with him. Now that he had fitted himself
once more into his furrow all he asked was to stay there. It had even become an
effort, when summer came, to put off his
New York
habits and go with his wife to their little
place in the country. And the idea that he might have to go away with her in
mid-February was positively disturbing.

 
          
For
the past ten days she had been fighting a bad bronchitis, following on
influenza. But “fighting” was hardly the right word. She, usually so elastic,
so indomitable, had not shown her usual resiliency, and Dorrance, from the
vantage ground of his recovered health, wondered a little at her lack of
spirit. She mustn’t let herself go, he warned her gently. “I was in a good deal
tighter place myself not so many years ago—and look at me now. Don’t you let
the doctors scare
you.
” She had promised him again
that morning that she wouldn’t, and he had gone off to his office without
waiting for the physician’s visit. But during the day he began in an odd way to
feel his wife’s nearness. It was as though she needed him, as though there were
something she wanted to say; and he concluded that she probably knew she ought
to go south, and had been afraid to tell him so. “Poor child—of course I’ll
take her if the doctor says it’s really necessary.” Hadn’t he always done
everything he could for her? It seemed to him that they had been married for
years and years, and that as a husband he had behind him a long and
irreproachable record. Why, he hadn’t even answered that girl’s letters….

 
          
As
he opened the door of the flat a strange woman in a nurse’s dress crossed the
hall. Instantly Dorrance felt the alien atmosphere of the place, the sense of
something absorbing and exclusive which ignores and averts itself from the
common doings of men. He had felt that same atmosphere, in all its somber
implications, the day he had picked up the cancer diagnosis from the floor.

 
          
The
nurse stopped to say “Pneumonia,” and hurried down the passage to his wife’s room.
The doctor was coming back at
nine o’clock
; he had left a note in the library, the
butler said. Dorrance knew what was in the note before he opened it.
Precipitately, with the vertical drop of a bird of prey, death was descending
on his house again. And this time there was no mistake in the diagnosis.

 
          
The
nurse said he could come in for a minute; but he wasn’t to stay long, for she
didn’t like the way the temperature was
rising
… and
there, between the chalk-white pillows, in the green-shaded light, he saw his
wife’s face. What struck him first was the way it had shrunk and narrowed after
a few hours of fever; then, that though it wore a just-perceptible smile of
welcome, there was no sign of the tremor of illumination which usually greeted
his appearance. He remembered how once, encountering that light, he had
grumbled inwardly: “I wish to God she wouldn’t always unroll a red carpet when
I come in—” and then been ashamed of his thought. She never embarrassed him by
any public show of feeling; that subtle play of light remained invisible to
others, and his irritation was caused simply by knowing it was there. “I don’t
want to be anybody’s sun and moon,” he concluded. But now she was looking at
him with a new, an almost critical equality of expression. His first thought
was: “Is it possible she doesn’t know me?” But her eyes met his with a glance
of recognition, and he understood that the change was simply due to her being
enclosed in a world of her own, complete, and independent of his.

 
          
“Please,
now—” the nurse reminded him; and obediently he stole out of the room.

 
          
The
next day there was a slight improvement; the doctors were encouraged; the day
nurse said; “If only it goes on like this—”; and as Dorrance opened the door of
his wife’s room he thought: “If only she looks more like her own self—!”

 
          
But
she did not. She was still in that new and self-contained world which he had
immediately identified as the one he had lived in during the months when he had
thought he was to die. “After all, I didn’t die,” he reminded himself; but the
reminder brought no solace, for he knew exactly what his wife was feeling, he
had tested the impenetrability of the barrier which shut her off from the
living. “The truth is, one doesn’t only die once,” he mused, aware that he had
died already; and the memory of the process, now being re-enacted before him,
laid a chill on his heart. If only he could have helped her, made her
understand! But the barrier was there, the transparent barrier through which
everything on the hither side looked so different. And today it was he who was
on the hither side.

 
          
Then
he remembered how, in his loneliness, he had yearned for the beings already so
remote, the beings on the living side; and he felt for his wife the same rush
of pity as when he had thought himself dying, and known what agony his death
would cost her.

 
          
That
day he was allowed to stay five minutes; the next day ten; she continued to
improve, and the doctors would have been perfectly satisfied if her heart had
not shown signs of weakness. Hearts, however, medically speaking, are
relatively easy to deal with; and to Dorrance she seemed much stronger.

 
          
Soon
the improvement became so marked that the doctor made no objection to his
sitting with her for an hour or two; the nurse was sent for a walk, and
Dorrance was allowed to read the morning paper to the invalid. But when he took
it up his wife stretched out her hand. “No-—I want to talk to you.”

 
          
He
smiled, and met her smile. It was as if she had found a slit in the barrier and
were
reaching out to him. “Dear—but won’t talking tire
you?”

 
          
“I
don’t know.
Perhaps.”
She waited. “You see, I’m
talking to you all the time, while I lie here……….”

 
          
He
knew—he knew! How her pangs went through him! “But you see, dear, raising your
voice………..”

 
          
She
smiled incredulously, that remote behind-the-barrier smile he had felt so often
on his own lips. Though she could reach through to him the dividing line was
still there, and her eyes met his with a look of weary omniscience.

 
          
“But
there’s no hurry,” he argued. “Why not wait a day or two? Try to lie there and
not even think.”